The crack of gunshots rings out in a quiet suburb of Stockholm close to midnight.
Minutes later, blue emergency lights illuminate a semi-detached house in Huddinge, in the south of the city. Police officers armed with automatic weapons and night goggles sweep the area looking for the gunman.
Welcome to the murky and dangerous world of gangland Stockholm, a chilling landscape of shootings, bomb explosions and allegations of blackmail. A brutal underworld that has spread its tentacles into football — and forms a backdrop to some of the Premier League’s biggest transfers.
The Huddinge shootings have been connected in Sweden to an extortion attempt involving the family of a football agent linked to the £64million transfer of striker Viktor Gyokeres – a hero of the national team with 15 goals in 26 caps – to Arsenal.
They believe the potentially deadly narrative was sparked by the agent boasting about his slice of the deal on social media — and that the perpetrators wanted a share of that cash.
The figure in question was photographed posing with Gyokeres in front of an Arsenal badge at the club’s London Colney training base.
A shooting has been linked to an agent who was involved in Viktor Gyokeres’s £64million move to Arsenal this summer
Swedish police are on high alert over allegations of blackmail, explosions and shootings
And it’s not an isolated incident. The Swedish leagues that have provided a rich seam of talent for teams across Europe have become infiltrated by unscrupulous individuals preying on young footballers and employing brutal tactics to claim their share of the multi-billion pound transfer industry.
Stockholm is the city behind the two marquee players embroiled in the most high-profile Premier League transfer stories of this summer — Gyokeres and his Sweden strike partner, Alexander Isak.
Gyokeres signed for Arsenal on July 26 after a bitter transfer battle, with the president of his Portuguese club Sporting Lisbon, Frederico Varandas, accusing the player’s camp of ‘blackmail and insults’ while he tried to force through a move to London.
Isak is in a stand-off with Newcastle as he tries to force a British record move to Liverpool, the reigning champions. The player is on strike, missing his club’s opening two fixtures and drawing the ire of the fans that so recently adored him. And the role of his agent Vlado Lemic in this has recently come under the microscope.
Daily Mail Sport went to Sweden to investigate the stories behind these transfers, to probe the darkness at the heart of Swedish football and how it might link to the Premier League.
While there is no suggestion that these players’ agents have been involved in criminal behaviour, that these transfers have been scarred comes as no surprise to Fredrik Gardare, a former Stockholm police detective superintendent.
Gardare, who led the Swedish police’s action group against organised crime in sport from 2017 to December 2021, acts as an advisor to the police and government.
He told Daily Mail Sport: ‘We have had problems with unsavoury networks in Swedish football since 2015. They see that there is a lot of money to be made.
There are questions being asked about agents linked to Sweden’s two highest-profile players – Alexander Isak (left) and Viktor Gyokeres
Isak came through at AIK in Stockholm, before joining Borussia Dortmund in 2017 at the age of just 17
‘It has been very easy for them to come inside this industry. We have seen some violence come up to the surface one or two years ago where we have had bombings and shootings.
‘We have had up 10 of these type of cases in that period. In criminal networks it is standard now to use hand grenades, bombs, or shoot at somebody’s home. So it’s natural that it also happened in the context of football.’
There are loopholes in the Swedish regulations that allow agents to target young footballing talents. Many of those children would first be spotted on the pitches of Isak’s boyhood club AIK.
It was here, at the Skytteholmsparken complex in Solna, north-west Stockholm, that staff from the agency Universal — headed by Lemic and Masireh Jadama — would scout young talent. But what started as talent spotting turned into something far more sinister. Unlike in England, where agents cannot approach players under 18 without parental consent, Sweden’s loose rules create a wild west.
‘Typically agents approach players directly, sometimes as young as 13,’ said Bjorn Thuresson, president of IFK Aspudden-Tellus, the club Gyokeres joined aged five. ‘It’s allowed from 14, but it’s still frowned upon. It’s a massive red flag. Football is a strange world.’
AIK had become Sweden’s prime talent development pipeline, nurturing the likes of Isak and Brighton’s Yasin Ayari. The sales of promising young players to Europe’s big clubs generated large revenues for AIK — and lined the pockets of agents.
According to Swedish newspaper Dagens ETC, Universal had so deeply infiltrated the academy that some coaches and scouts were employed by both the club and the agency. This meant that internal decisions, such as playing time, could be influenced to raise a player’s market value before a sale, and it incentivised agents to push transfers that would personally benefit them or their agency, rather than the club.
The agency could ensure the country’s best youth players signed with them and later ship them off abroad for millions.
Jadama, who was involved in Isak’s first big move – from AIK to Borussia Dortmund as a 17-year-old in 2017 for around £8m – has been investigated for alleged direct financial ties to criminal groups, with police documents claiming he had received large sums of money from a convicted money launderer, a narcotics offender and an individual later sentenced to life for murder. He was not prosecuted and denied the claims.
His former associate Lemic – a 59-year-old Croatia-born Serb who still represents Isak and helped to broker deals such as Luka Modric’s move from Tottenham to Real Madrid in 2012, as well as Chelsea’s signings of Branislav Ivanovic, Arjen Robben and Mateo Kovacic – has been banned from Dutch giants PSV Eindhoven because of his controversial influence and practices.
The former footballer, who also represents Aston Villa goalkeeper Emi Martinez, was banned after then-CEO Jan Reker claimed Lemic and technical manager Stan Valckx were profiting from player transfers inappropriately. Lemic denies wrongdoing and none was proven.
At the end of 2023, the Cyprus Leaks investigation claimed Lemic received £7m from ex-Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich through offshore companies, allegedly aimed at bypassing UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations.
The documents exposed numerous clandestine financial deals involving Abramovich — who is banned from visiting the EU, with his assets frozen in multiple countries, because of alleged financial ties to Vladimir Putin — and his offshore entities.
Lemic is not officially a licensed player agent, but is viewed as an advisor. He works with his brother Zoran, who holds a FIFA licence, and several other partners, such as former Arsenal and Borussia Dortmund head of recruitment Sven Mislintat, through whom official communication with clubs is usually made.
In England, it is mandatory for clubs to work with FIFA-licensed and FA-registered agents. In Sweden, there is no formal enforcement to ensure this.
The FA publishes a public register of intermediaries, but the Swedish FA does not. In England, clubs must publicly report payments to agents annually. In Sweden, there is no mandatory public disclosure. These loopholes have turned Sweden into the perfect place to target and exploit academies.
Lemic has ties to former Arsenal head of recruitment Sven Mislintat (pictured)
Gyokeres got off the mark for his new club at the weekend with two goals in a 5-0 demolition of Leeds
Gardare added: ‘That player (Isak) was one of the first to be traded in that (Universal) network. Of those AIK players that they (Universal) did business with, (Isak) was the most famous and youngest. He was under 18 years of age and it’s against the regulations to do that.
‘The Swedish sports confederation gave the highest fine that they could, and that was nothing much in the whole picture.’
The world of football has been contaminated by those hungry for their slice of the hundreds of millions of pounds swilling around in transfer fees to Europe’s biggest leagues, including the Premier League.
The Universal agency split into different factions after Lemic and Jadama fell out, but Universal Twenty Two is headed by Lemic, who is based in Belgium.
‘It’s a lot of different names (for the organisation),’ said Gardare. ‘It’s chaotic. ‘We told the police and warned the federation about (Universal), and we warned the club AIK.
‘A lot of people in that network are well known to the Swedish police since many years.’
Agents from the Swedish branch of Universal have been victims of a number of violent attacks in the past year. Shots were fired at the home of one agent in December — he wasn’t inside — and the following month, the car of another was set alight. Days later, an explosion was let off in a stairwell at the address of an agent’s relative.
This mirrors the attack in Huddinge this month on the relative of an agent closely linked to Hasan Cetinkaya, who heads HCM Sports Management and represents Gyokeres. It reflects the greed seeping out of high-profile transfers.
Days after the shooting, at 11.45pm on August 10, Daily Mail Sport visited the quiet line of detached family homes, where the residents remain shaken. A source said: ‘This agent has a corporation linked with Hasan Cetinkaya. He is friends with Hasan, so he travelled to London with Hasan and a group of others for the Viktor Gyokeres unveiling at Arsenal and posted a picture with Gyokeres on social media.’
A Swedish agent told Daily Mail Sport that players are advised to make problems for the clubs they want to leave.
Isak is on strike at Newcastle as he looks to force through a move to Liverpool
The AIK youth training centre where Isak grew up and made his talents known
He said: ‘Gyokeres didn’t turn up for pre-season, that makes a problem for the club. Eddie Howe made an announcement that he can’t pick Alexander Isak for the first game of the season, even though has three more years on his contract. That is a joke.
‘It’s definitely, definitely (influenced by the agent). The agents always want to make transfers because that’s how they get the money.’
Gardare is not surprised by the problems. ‘They (agents) want it to be difficult,’ he said. ‘They want to ensure they are the only actors in the deal. They have to fool everybody and see that everybody is earning money on this, that this is a very good deal where everybody is a winner.
‘With Alexander Isak, it is very interesting to see what’s happened with him from AIK until now.’
Attacks against agents and their relatives is only one part of the criminality. Match-fixing is rife, too. Gardare was tasked with clamping down on the problem, which has spiralled in the country. It is a lucrative avenue criminals are turning to.
‘We have a lot of problems with match-fixing in this country,’ he said. ‘Sweden has a bigger problem than many other countries.’
Among Gardare’s previous cases included an 18-month investigation exposing ex-Manchester City, Preston, Norwich, Sunderland, Fulham and Blackburn midfielder Dickson Etuhu of bribery for attempting to fix matches in Sweden.
Etuhu was charged in September 2018 for offering a bribe to AIK’s Kenny Stamatopoulos, his former team-mate, to fix a match against Gothenburg. The game was cancelled after the authorities were informed of the plot.
The 43-year-old was found guilty of match-fixing in November the following year, before being banned from football in Sweden for five years.
Separately, in December 2020, Swedish prosecutors charged five individuals for match-fixing in the country. Of the five, four were players who were all found guilty and received long-term bans. These included Pawel Cibicki, who was on loan at Swedish top-flight side Elfsborg from Leeds United. He deliberately received a yellow card in a May 2019 match and received money from a person who had placed a bet on it.
Former Premier League midfielder Dickson Etuhu was banned from football in Sweden for five years for attempting to fix matches
Swedish police are battling against chilling threats to life in the murky criminal underworld
From suburban shootings to murky transfers, Sweden’s football market is no longer just a breeding ground for talent, but a hunting ground for criminals.
This is not just a Swedish problem, it’s European football’s open wound. As long as the money flows from the shadows of Stockholm’s academies to the Premier League and beyond, the violence is set to continue.
We have spoken with innocent people caught up in this chilling landscape. They want lax rules to be swiftly tightened and agent ties to criminality shut down.
They believe the heart of the game is at stake.
